Many parents have opted not to let their kids get the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, causing the vaccination rates to lag. Their decision could be responsible for the measles outbreak that hit Columbus, Ohio, late last year.
Amid the outbreak, public health officials found that 80 to 85, or majority of the cases, were unvaccinated children. They sought to get to the bottom of the issue, so they interviewed the parents of the unvaccinated kids, and what they found was shocking.
After speaking with the parents, the officials found that most were hesitant to get their kids the vaccine shots out of fear that the immune-boosting formula could lead to autism — a developmental disability affecting the brain.
“What our team heard from many parents is that they weren’t necessarily against vaccines, and their children had other age-appropriate vaccines, but they were specifically putting off the MMR vaccine or waiting as long as they could before they had to get it because of fears it could lead to autism,” Columbus Public Health director of public affairs & communications Kelli Newman told ABC News.
The belief that the MMR vaccine could cause autism stemmed from a 1998 study, which allegedly found evidence linking the two. The paper by Andrew Wakefield published in the journal Lancet claimed the vaccine caused a series of events, including intestinal inflammation, entrance into the bloodstream of proteins harmful to the brain and consequent autism development.
However, health experts already discredited the study, which got retracted from the journal. But in 2002, Wakefield and his colleagues published another paper examining the relationship between the measles virus and autism. They even tested intestinal biopsy samples from children with and without autism. They found that 75 of 91 children with autism had the measles virus in their intestines compared with only 5 of 70 children without autism.
While the findings may seem alarming, experts pointed out…
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